Yes; There’s Life Left In Power PC Apple ‘Books, But.....
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
Does a G4 PowerBook still make sense as a choice for as a workhorse laptop? Low End Mac’s Dan Bashur thinks so, contending that the last generation aluminum PowerBooks represented an amazing end to an era of the professional line of PowerPC Mac notebooks -- the pinnacle of their product line.
Those final PowerBook G4s, he says, were special machines, mature products most flaws and bugs worked out and perfected to a degree that they’re sought after by collectors.
The 12” PowerBook’s continued popularity has been especially persistent, buoyed by the fact that the original MacBook, which assumed the Little Al’s price slot after the Intel changeover, was simply too bulky and heavy to be considered a satisfactory replacement for the ultra small, 8.6” x 10.9” footprint 12-incher for serious road warriors. Nor did the MacBook Air that came along in January, 2008 represent an adequate solution due to the number of compromises, feature omissions and limitations that rule it out as a candidate for a full-fledged comprehensive portable workhorse — a role the 12” PowerBook filled admirably with its reasonable processor power, decent video support, its complement of I/O ports, and expansion potential for RAM and hard drive upgrades.
The last generation 1.67 GHz 15” and 17” PowerBooks are also impressive pieces of work, particularly the units with 1440 x 960 and 1680 x 1050 high-resolution displays respectively (26 percent and 36 percent greater than the previous generations) that were released in October 2005 — the last revisions of the Power PC Mac laptops. The 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks also got a claimed additional hour of battery life.
Aside from the high-res-screen availability, the October, 2005 revision 15” and 17” models came standard with a 64 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 GPUs carried over from the January, 2005 revision, and a 128 MB dual-link DVI video option was available, with hi-res models being standard with the 128 MB dual-link DVI which is capable of driving a 30” high resolution monitor or even supporting supporting a modest amount of 3D gaming.
Speaking of which, according to Dan Bashur toward the end of the Power PC era “there were quite a few impressive ports and releases of games that will simply blow you away (even by today’s standards) when running on the heavy hitting G4 processors of any 2005 Aluminum PowerBook G4... and a late model PowerBook G4 still gives you an abundance of high-end gaming options, but at a fraction of the price of current hardware.”
I’m not much of a gamer myself, but, I am a car freak, and last summer I did test Feral’s Ford Racing 2 on my 1.33 GHz 17” G4 PowerBook and found that it ran quite acceptably, without jumpy video or other aggravations/.
The 15” and 17” aluminum PowerBooks — even my older model — had an impressive I/O connectivity array with two USB 2.0 ports, one each FireWire 400 and 800, stereo audio/headphone out, stereo audio in, DVI video out, S-video out, a PC CardBus slot, gigabit Ethernet, built in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and a modem jack for the internal 56k modem.
My AlBook is slower and less powerful than those 2005 examples, with its slower processor and just a Mobility RADEON 9600 GPU with 64 MB of VRAM, and a more modest resolution 1440 x 900 resolution display, but it’s still pretty formidable.
These PowerBook G4 machines can still run many of today’s applications and are supported by the latest MacOS 10.5.7, although version 10.5.8, expected by next month or sooner, will likely be the ultimate OS to support Power PC Macs -- the forthcoming OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard” being Intel-only.
Frankly, Leopard is plenty enough for my 1.33 GHz PowerBook, and there’s still a case to be made for OS X 10.4 “Tiger” which imposes somewhat lower hardware demand and can support the OS X Classic environment for those of use to whom that is an issue of merit.
Certainly, prices of these ultimate PowerBooks are holding up remarkably well. For example, Wegener Media which has one of the most comprehensive inventories of used and refurbished Mac laptops on the Web, offers the 1.67 GHz G4 Powerbook Aluminum DVI with 1GB RAM, and 80GB HDD for $689.99, or the same spec. with a SD (high resolution) display for $799.99.
However, they will also sell you a 15.4” 1.83ghz Core Duo Intel MacBook Pro with 512 MB RAM, an 80GB HDD, and 128 GB for $899.99, a similarly equipped 2.0 GHz unit for $979.99. or with a 100GB HDD and 256 MB VRAM for $1099.99.
In terms of 17” models, Wegeners offer the 1.67 GHz 17” Powerbook with 1 GB RAM, and a 100 GB HDD for $899.99 vs. a 2.16 GHZ Core Duo 17” MacBook Pro with 1GB RAM, a 160 GB HDD and 256 GB VRAM for $1379.99
The point is that the early Intel MacBook Pros, while their clock speeds are not radically different from the 2005 aluminum PowerBooks, are radically real world faster in most respects for not that much more money, and have the advantage of a less inhibited future since they will be able to run Snow Leopard and the increasingly prolific selection of Intel-only software, such as for instance MacSpeech Dictate, the Stainless browser and presumably the Mac version of Google’s Chrome browser when it’s released.
Once Snow Leopard is on the prowl, you can expect that the availability of applications that continue to support OS 10.4, already diminishing, will disappear at a faster rate, and Power PC versions of Leopard apps. as well. With Snow Leopard going Intel-only, there will be much less incentive for developers to commit resources to support Power PC versions of their software, so keeping up-to-date will be more and more difficult for Power PC holdouts.
And of course besides used/refurb. early MacBook Pros, there is also even more competition from MacBooks — both polycarbonate and aluminum, and the new 13” MacBook Pro. I’ve seen Apple Certified white MacBooks offered as low as $50 at The Apple Store.
I recently switched from the old 17” PowerBook to a 2.9 GHz 13” unbody MacBook, and it’s a whole different dimension performance-wise as well as being able to run the growing number of Intel-only applications and of course Snow Leopard when it lands.
Currently, the online Apple Store is offering Apple Certified Refurbished 2.0 GHz unibody MacBooks for $949.00, 2.4 GHz unibodies for $1,099.00, and the latest model 2.13 GHz white MacBooks for $849.00 — any of which will be a much more lasting value than any Power PC PowerBook for a $hundred or two less, and with their Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics they will also be much more capable gaming machines than the best-equipped Power PC models. The 13” unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro are also a more than worthy Intel=based successor to the 12” PowerBook, with just a bit larger footprint but thinner and lighter and so much more powerful.
I still am getting useful service out of my 17” PowerBook, and for that matter my G4 upgraded Pismo PowerBooks that are now entering their 10th year, but the proverbial writing is on the wall and while Power PC hardware will continue to be useful within a shrinking circumscriptions of limitation and compromise for years to come yet, the Power PC Mac’s day is over ad a truly satisfactory first-line system
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